How to build a robot, practical lessons for Italian high school students
29 March 2017 - A device to monitor sucking in newborns and one to assess their musical preferences, two systems related to the study of grip and manipulation for hand prostheses, together with different platforms designed by students of the master's degreecourse in Biomedical Engineering: this is what the engineers presented UCBM inside the Rome cup 2017, the event that has been connecting research centres, universities, schools, companies and institutions on the subject of robotics since 2007.
Within the demonstration area of the fair, researchers from theBiomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems Unit they presented some recently developed prototypes to hundreds of young people. Objective: to explain what robots are and how it is possible to build "these programmable machines capable of generating movement", as stated in one of the brochures prepared for the participants.
Two devices for newborns
A result achieved by making visitors interact directly with the patented technologies. For example with the FAM (Feeding Assessment Module), a low-cost sensorized unit that can be easily mounted at the base of common bottles to measure the mechanism by which the baby feeds. A useful tool for monitoring one of the earliest activities of life, which in some newborns can be compromised by coordination difficulties.
Also for use in the first years of children's lives, at Romecup the researchers presented a device designed to analyze musical preferences, until now evaluated only on the basis of responses to acoustic stimuli. The invention is that of a simple inverted pendulum toy, a kind of instrument that the child learns to play. In this way, its movements and the corresponding behavior of the toy are measured in real time by a magneto-inertial sensor inside the device. This allows to obtain the information necessary for the production of sound and the style with which the object is explored, a method which, together with a commercial system for monitoring brain activity, is used to investigate the main characteristics of musical preferences and the their origin during development.
Robotic hand studies
The last one could not miss the event robotic hand which is associated with the recognition system for 6 different hand postures: rest, power grip, tri/bi-digital grip, open hand, pointed index finger and lateral grip. Born from the collaboration with the INAIL Prosthesis Center of Vigorso di Budrio, the device acquires the electromyographic signals thus classifying them into different pattern, in order to identify the subject's will and send control commands to a prosthetic hand. Related to the study of gripping and manipulation operations, the sensor cylinder: an integrated device with 16 sensors and a central unit which communicates via bluetooth the information relating to the forces of interaction between the hand and the object as well as the orientation of the object itself during manipulation. These two studies aimed at the development of hand prostheses ever closer in shape and function to natural limbs, and which in Romecup aroused the interest and curiosity of the high school students present.
